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Execution: Turning Strategy into Performance

You want your organization to be the best it can be at what is does – to be a winner.

How do you make that happen month after month, year after year? A brilliant strategy or a killer brand isn’t enough.

You need to be able to articulate your strategy in simple terms and then consistently put it into action.

Without execution, the breakthrough thinking breaks down, learning adds no value, people don’t meet their goals, and the revolution stops dead in its tracks. What you get is change for the worse, because failure drains the energy from your organization.

– Larry Bossidy

3 Keys to Execution

Execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy – People think of execution as the tactical side of an organization. That’s the first big mistake. Tactics are central to execution, but execution is not tactics. Execution is fundamental to strategy and has to shape it.

Execution is the major job of the organization leader – An organization can execute only if the leader’s heart and soul are immersed in the organization. Execution requires a comprehensive understanding of the organization, its people, and its environment.

Execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture – Execution doesn’t work unless people are schooled in it and practice it constantly. It doesn’t work if only a few people in the system practice it. The discipline of execution has to be part of an organization’s culture, driving the behavior of all leaders at all levels.

Leadership without the discipline of execution is incomplete and ineffective.

Without the ability to execute, all other attributes of leadership become hollow.

Adapted from Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan